Back in the day, there was a great build up of excitement for the World Series. During the Series itself, because it is 4-7 games long, there was constant drama and excitement after each game. MLB marketing can take advantage of the ongoing drama until the final out of the final game is made. This is something the Super Bowl does not have because it is one and done.

The World Series will never return to it's glory years "back in the day." As has been noted a million times over, there's just too much distraction, too much other entertainment out there available to casual fans. Among sports fans, the World Series is still a very relevant event, and it had great TV ratings for the year 2012. But if you think that we're ever going to go back to the 1960s where 1/3 of the country is going to tune in for a week to watch the 4th best NL team from San Francisco against the 7th best team in the AL from Detroit. That's just a completely unrealistic scenario. It's never going to happen. Deal with it.

And I completely disagree that there's no ongoing drama to the Super Bowl, as it is the culmination of the NFL Play-offs, which by themselves are enough of a cultural event. The Super Bowl is basically a guaranteed Game 7 every single year, a final, do or die, winner take all showdown for the championship. It's the same phenomenon that allows people to care about the NCAA Tournament stacked with schools, teams, players, etc. that they've never heard of. The drama of "one and done" allows casual viewers to tune in and get involved for a few hours one night. Asking casual viewers to tune in 4-7 nights over 5-9 days is just not a realistic. Baseball simply can't replicate that kind of drama, especially not when the series lasts 4 games because one team didn't even bother to show up to play.

The build up to the World Series you remember was mostly due to the fact that it was really the best vs. the best in a showdown. But the diluting of the leagues into divisions and the expansion of the playoffs has ruined that. Nobody who paid attention to baseball this season thinks the Giants or Tigers were really the best representatives of their leagues. They just happened to be the lucky bastards who were in the right spot at the right time. So you have to choose which is better, the artificial excitement and drama that the expanded playoffs and division chases cause (for example, the White Sox-Tigers chase that went down to the last week of the season would have been completely void without the divisional format, as either team would have been out of the playoff hunt by August) or forgoing all that to again make the World Series a truly "best of the best" representative event in which the AL's best plays the NL's best. But that seems to detract a lot more than it adds.